Tag: broadfork

Making Use of Greenhouse Space in Winter

Josh Sattin has another video from my interview in November. Creative Ways to Maximize the Winter Greenhouse is about 11 minutes long and includes our greenhouse planted with leaf lettuce for the winter and Dave Henderson of Red’s Quality Acre in his hoophouse with kale growing in pots on upside down tables.

Get the Right Fork for the Task at Hand

Too often I hear new gardeners mistakenly call a digging fork a pitchfork, for reasons I have not grasped. So I set out to learn more about the names of forks.

Pitchforks

Americans are familiar with pitchforks from the famous American Gothic painting. The pitchfork has a long handle (often longer than the 4 ft one in the painting). It has curved slender round-section tines (prongs). Sometimes three, often only two. You couldn’t dig your garden with this tool! It is made for pitching hay up onto wagons, originally for loose hay (or straw), but also for small square bales. I used pitchforks in England when I was in my twenties. The trick is to vigorously stab the fork down into the middle of a bale on the ground. The next step is to lift the bale up vertically on the fork (hence the need for a long handle!) This trick is achieved by holding the pitchfork with one hand near the tines and the other as far back up the handle as you can comfortably reach. Then you quickly pivot the pitchfork so the bale is up in the air, still impaled on the pitchfork. If you have to wait for the wagon, set the other end of the handle on the ground. This is less work than supporting the whole weight of the bale. When the wagon is alongside, (carefully) “offer up” the bale to the person on the wagon stacking the bales. Sometimes you have to walk to the wagon a short distance. Keep the bale up in the air for this!

Manure forks

Manure or compost forks are long-handled forks similar to pitchforks but with more, thicker tines, maybe 5 or 6 tines. They are for lifting manure, woodchips, or compost from a pile and setting it down again not far away. Or for mucking out stables and cow byres. They excel at separating layers of wet sticky materials. Stick the tines into the pile horizontally, not too far down the pile. Lift up a flake of whatever it is. Don’t dig the garden with those either. And don’t use them for pitching hay, as the tines are too close together to do a good job of stabbing hay bales.

Here you can see the long handles of the manure forks.Pam Dawling

The Garden Tool Companydistinguishes manure forks from compost forks, which they say are the same as pitchforks usually with four or more long slender, pointed tines that are turned up slightly for scooping or moving loose material without bending. Great for turning your compost pile or moving loose materials. Pitchforks are too lightweight to handle the heavy weight of compost, so many gardeners opt to use the heavier duty garden fork…also, manure forks look very similar, but are not for lifting heavy loads.

Long-handled potato fork

See below for information on short-handled potato forks. Less common is a long-handled type of potato fork with up to 9 slender tines, like a manure fork but with blunt ends so as not to damage the root crops. This type of potato fork is for lifting the crops up off the ground, not digging.

Short forks

Radius-Pro digging fork

The short-handled forks always have four tines. These forks may have a D or a T handle. These days more people prefer a D handle.

There’s also the newer Radius PRO Stainless Digging Forkwith a circular handle. The handle design is ergonomic, and looks odd, but actually works well. We bought these because we wanted to try a stainless steel fork (less mud, rust and additional weight).

Digging forks

also known as garden forks or spading forks, have sharp, pointed, square-section tines, usually 7”-9” (18-23 cm) long. Wikipedia also gives these tools the name “graip.” The best garden forks are forged from a single piece of strong carbon steel and have either a long riveted socket or strapped handle connection. They are used for loosening, lifting and turning over the soil. They are good at penetrating hard soil, digging to incorporate compost or cover crops, and double digging (if you do that). They can also be used to dig up root crops, or shrubs. It is much easier to get a digging fork into the ground at depth than a shovel or a spade (no, they’re not the same thing), and the tines can work their way between rocks and large roots.

Three potato forks to the left, four digging forks to the right.Pam Dawling

Border forks are smaller digging forks, narrower and shorter. (Hard on tall people that want to dig out weeds in their close-packed flower borders!) I think there’s an assumption that it will be the shorter people (women, mostly) working in the flower borders. But any company that makes tools sized for women gets my vote.

Potato forks have flat-fronted triangular-section tines. They are not so good for digging over the soil. They are for gentle diagonal probing and lifting of root crops and tubers from relatively loose soil. They do less damage than the same person with a digging fork. They can be used as digging forks in loose soil if you have nothing better.

In Choosing a Garden Fork, the Garden Tool Companydistinguishes between Digging, Spading, Garden (English), Manure, Compost, Potato, Broadfork and Border forks. Their distinctions are not entirely the same as mine. They distinguish garden forks from digging and spading forks (lighter weight flat-bladed types good for loose soil). This leads to confusion when trying to distinguish potato forks from digging forks. I prefer to think of square-tined forks as for digging and flat-tined forks as for lifting potatoes. Good potato forks should also be of strong steel. “Nobendium” as I’ve heard it called!

The Broadfork

Although very different in appearance from a traditional garden fork, the two handled broadfork does a lot of the same chores, but on a bigger scale. With two steel or hardwood handles fitted about shoulder width on a steel horizontal bar and 4, 5, 6 or more long tines; the broadfork is a large, heavy tool made to cultivate and aerate soil without fossil fuels. Hold the handles upright, stab the tines into the soil, step up onto the crossbar with both feet, pushing the long tines into the ground. Step off backwards and pull the handles towards you, causing the tines to lift and loosen the soil, opening up air channels. A broadfork can replace tilling in ground that has been worked before. After broadforking, rake the surface to get a fine tilth for sowing. Those with small gardens can do the same thing with a spading fork, which is what I always did before our gardens got to be so big we needed a rototiller. A broadfork might well be the right scale for those gardens too big to dig with a spading fork and small enough to manage without a tiller.

Barbara and I are alike in wanting to reduce fork confusion, and mostly agree on terminology, As with everything agricultural, there are some differences. She uses the name Spading Fork for what I call Digging/Spading/Garden Forks, and the name Digging fork for flat-tined forks that I call Potato Forks. Here’s her helpful distinction between manure forks and pitchforks:

“A manure fork . . . is more rugged than a pitchfork, it is nevertheless a lifting-and-pitching tool. Confusingly, the name is often used interchangeably with bedding fork, ensilage fork, scoop fork, stall materials that have not decomposed much, can be moved with a few tines, widely spaced. More-crumbly compost, and mulches such as shredded bark and wood chips, require the type with many tines, spaced close together, so the material does not fall through. (The manure fork was designed to scoop lumps of solid manure from even finer material such as wood shavings, letting that bedding fall back into the stall.)”

Handle length

If you are above average height, buy tools with longer handles than standard.

Stainless or carbon steel

Carbon steel is usually stronger than stainless, but stainless is easier to look after, slides through the soil smoothly and won’t weigh you down with accumulations of mud. For digging forks, I have become a fan of stainless.

Replacement handles

has a wide selection of good quality wood handles online. They specialize in hickory, white oak and ash. Be careful making your selection, and get the handle that’s just right for the tool you are repairing. You can see a lot of their handles in our photos. During the winter we usually have a “Santa’s workshop” day when we repair tools.

There are YouTube videos showing how to make sturdy repairs. Just be sure to shape the handle for a good fit before drilling any holes for rivets. And learn how to make rivets from large nails if none are supplied with your replacement handle. Sharp edges on poking-out badly finished rivets, or nuts and bolts can cause injuries. Sweat we might need. Blood and tears we can do without.

As growers, we do not have control over everything that happens. The main thing outside of our control is the weather, and it’s only going to get more chaotic as climate change bites. Heavy rain events can leave soil impossible to work, because the water can’t drain away fast enough. What can we do when it’s too wet?

Laura Lengnick in Resilient Agriculture views climate change as yet another production risk to assess and prepare for. The vulnerability of your farm has two components: exposure and adaptive capacity. As far as exposure, the most immediate key exposure is water issues (too much and too little). As for adaptive capacity, the main feature is our personal capacity to respond and plan. We need to pay greater attention to the climate as a critical factor in our decision-making.

Be Prepared

See Weatherspark.comfor easy-to-understand graphics showing the average weather in your locality. Figure out which crops are most marginal already in your climate, and decide whether they are worth keeping in your crop portfolio, and whether they are important enough to be worth providing more protection for.

Using raised beds can help excess water to drain sooner.

Raised beds will drain and be ready to plant sooner after rain.Photo Ezra Freeman

Increasing the organic matter content of the soil helps it absorb more water in a manageable way, without compacting and going anaerobic. Compost improves the soil structure, organic matter and humus. The effects last longer than cover crops and crop residues, especially in humid conditions where the breakdown of plant material is very rapid.

Maximize the volume of living roots (food crops and cover crops) throughout the soil profile (use both deep-rooted and shallow-rooted crops).

Cover crops. The root channels improve the soil structure — fine roots make up 70% of the root biomass of crimson clover, vetches, and field peas, and when the cover crops are mowed, these roots support microbial growth, form active organic matter, and rapidly release N to the plants. Keeping roots in the soil all the time, or as much of the time as possible, will help prevent erosion.

Another option is a “drywell” or French drain, a big hole full of rock. We calculated that for our hoophouse, ours would need to be 11′ × 11′ (3.4 × 3.4 m) and 4′ (1.2 m) deep. It would have been a big area and a lot of rock (and money), and not inconsiderable maintenance to keep it free of sediment and leaves.

Field tile drainage

Keyline plowing (along contours).

Swales (also called “infiltration trenches”) allow water to gradually seep into the soil, while sending sudden large volumes downhill to an area which can absorb more water. A swale 18″ (45 cm) wide by 8″ (20 cm) deep in averagely draining soil can infiltrate approximately 1.6″ (4 cm) rain per hour per 20 ft2 (1.86 m2) of contributing area.

A caterpillar tunnel and a plastic mulched bed at Potomac vegetable Farms in November.Photo Pam Dawling

Physically cover the soil: hoophouses and caterpillar tunnels can help keep crops from deluges. Large structures do have the issue of runoff, but you can plan ahead for that and make a drainage system. When we built our hoophouse, we made a ditch around three sides of it, to channel runoff downhill. Some people who have roll-up or drop-down sidewalls install plastic guttering on the “hipwall” lumber that these structures need, and collect the rainwater for irrigation. Bear in mind that the water catchment barrel will be low down and the water will need pumping or dipping and hauling to be useful. Read the NRCS Code 558 Roof Runoff Structure.

Before the storm moves in, cover the soil where you plan to plant: temporary caterpillar tunnels (field houses), low tunnels, plastic mulches and tarping (occultation) can keep some of the soil dry, at the expense of causing runoff that makes other areas wetter. This can help get crucial plantings done in a timely way, leaving the wider problem to resolve later.

Fast-growing Red Salad Bowl lettuce.Photo Bridget Aleshire

First Aid if you can’t plant when you want to

Consider transplanting instead of direct seeding. We did this one year with our winter squash, when the plot was hopelessly too wet. We were able to transplant the squash fairly young, and did not have a big harvest delay.

Could you mow? This will prevent weeds seeding, and prevent the cover crop or previous food crop from getting any bigger. It will be easier to till once that does become possible.

If you can’t get a mower across the beds, can you use a weed whip (string trimmer) or a manual weed whacker or a scythe? This will buy you some time.

Could you use a broadfork? This will open up the soil, allowing it to dry faster.

Could you lay tarps over the whole mess, and wait for the cover crop or weeds to die?

Could you use a flame weeder to kill the existing vegetation? Flamers are intended to kill small weeds, not big ones, but we successfully used our wand-type flamer to kill weeds in the potato patch one spring when it was too wet to hill the potatoes.

Flaming (pre-emergent)Photo Brittany Lewis

Dealing with Floods

If your soil floods, drain it promptly, or you may end up with drowned plants (insufficient air) and with a high salt level caused by evaporation. Dig shallow trenches to let the flood water flow away.

After the flood recedes, you could lose yield from loss of soluble nutrients. The soil may have become anaerobic, reducing available nitrogen. If you have a suitable source of nitrogen, apply some. You may also get a flush of weeds, competing with your slow-to-recover crop.

Our hoophouse is covered mid-May to early-September with a large shadecloth.Photo Twin Oaks Community

Today we’re removing the giant piece of shadecloth that has been over the top of our hoophouse since mid-May. We’ll unclip the ropes, roll them up, then pull the shadecloth off onto the ground, roll and bundle it up. It’s important to store it so mice can’t get into the bundle and make holes. We already have a few of those!

The shadecloth is held on by ropes zig-zagging between snap grommets on the shadecloth and large hooks on the baseboard.Photo Twin Oaks Community

We’ve just finished preparing the first of our 7 hoophouse beds for the winter greens. Crops grow so fast in the hoophouse, and the organic matter in the soil is consumed at a rapid rate. Every new crop requires a fertility boost. In the fall, we prepare our beds by removing all the summer crops, and spreading four or five wheel­barrows of compost per 4′ × 96′ (1.2 × 29 m) bed. This is a generous 46 gals/100 ft2 (or 680 L/36 m2 bed)or more. A full wheelbarrow generally holds six cubic feet (44 gallons or 170 liters). 1 ft3 = 7.5 US gals. An inch of compost is about 8 ft3/100 ft2, or 60 gals/100 ft2; 20 gals/100 ft2 is 15 tons/acre (8.6 L/m2). Other professional growers use any­where from 12–40 gals/100 ft2 (5–17 L/m2). Some use much more.

There are 3 concerns about using too much compost: high phosphorus levels, raised salt levels and nitrate accumulation. Some growers like to do two years of high compost rates (40 gals/100 ft2, 17 L/m2 or more), then reduce the rate to half that and add fish or kelp, at only 5 oz–8 oz/100 ft2 (15–24 gm/m2) per year. Sustainable alternatives to compost in­clude organic pelleted chicken manure, alfalfa meal, etc.

Broadfork from Way Cool Tools.Photo Way Cool Tools

A few years after we put up our hoophouse, we noticed that despite our best efforts, we were walking on the edges of the beds and compact­ing them. Initially we simply loosened the edges of the beds with a digging fork. We then noticed that the plants on the edges grew better, and we realized the whole bed width needed loosening. If you have designed your hoophouse to use trac­tor equipment there, that will deal with soil com­paction. We wanted our hoophouse to be free of internal combustion engines and fossil fuels, and the broadfork has provided the solution. Ours is an all-steel broadfork from Way Cool Tools. We do an annual broadforking each fall, before planting our winter greens.

We set nylon twine to mark the bed edges, holding it in place using sod staples. The string alone has not been enough to stop us walking on the bed edges. Loose soil is important because our winter crops grow all the way to the edges of the beds. After spreading compost, we broadfork the beds, then vigorously work the compost into the top of the soil with scuffle hoes and rakes. We learned the hard way the importance of raking the soil to a fine tilth immediately after broadforking — you don’t want to let the broadforked clumps dry out into bricks before you rake! See the photo below and imagine what could happen!

I wrote about our bed prep method and tools, and also our outdoor sowings for transplanting into the hoophouse, with a special focus on suitable lettuce varieties in my post Sowing hoophouse winter crops here in Sept 2017.

We have just started planting our late fall, winter and early spring crops in the hoophouse. We are pre-sprouting our spinach for a week in a jar in the fridge. Soak the seed overnight, drain it in the morning, fit a mesh lid on the jar, and lay it on its side in the fridge. Once a day, give the jar a quarter turn to tumble the seeds and even out the moisture. If the seeds are a bit wet when you need to sow them, and clumped together, pour them out on a cloth to dry a bit before sowing.

We will sow five crops in our first bed on September 6 and 7– spinach, tatsoi, Bulls Blood beet greens, radishes and scallions. On September 15 we sow lettuces, chard, pak choy, Chinese cabbage, Tokyo Bekana and Yukina Savoy, in an outdoor bed to be transplanted into the hoophouse in a few weeks, after we’ve prepared another bed.

We plant crops closer in the hoophouse than outdoors, and closer to the edges of the beds. We don’t have many weeds in the hoophouse, and the paths are marked off with twine, to keep us from stepping on the beds. We find that the soil does slump and compact some of its own accord, even if we don’t step on the edges (and of course, some feet do find themselves on the bed edges), hence the once-a-year broadforking.

Young spinach plants (and henbit!) in our hoophouse in December. This is our second sowing, not the early September one.Photo Pam Dawling

Step-by-step guide to hoophouse fall bed prep:

Remove the summer crops to the compost pile,

Spread a generous layer of compost over the whole bed surface.

Gather the soil staples and move the drip tape off to one side or the other,

Broadfork the whole bed, but not all at once. Only broadfork the amount of space you have time to rake immediately, otherwise the warm hoophouse conditions dry out the soil and make it harder to cultivate into a fine tilth, which is the next task. We tackle 1/3 bed each day.

To use a broadfork, go backwards working the width of the bed. Stab the tines into the soil and step on the crossbar, holding the long handles. Step from foot to foot until the crossbar touches the soil, with the tines all the way in, then step off backwards, pulling the handles towards you. This loosens a big area of soil, which hopefully crumbles into chunks. Lift the broadfork and set it back in the soil about 6” (15 cm) back from the first bite. Note: you are not inverting the soil – this is not a “digging over” process. Step on the bar and repeat.

Sometimes we use a rake, breaking the clumps up with the back of the rake, then raking the soil to break up the smaller lumps, and reshape the bed. More often we use a wide stirrup hoe very energetically. This isn’t the job stirrup hoes were designed for (that’s very shallow hoeing), but the sharp hoe blade does a really good job of breaking up clumpy soil.

We’ve found it important to lay the drip tapes back in place in between each day’s work, so that the soil gets irrigated when we run the system and stays damp. We don’t want dead, baked soil.

When the bed is prepared, we measure out the areas for different crops and mark them with flags.

It’s been raining all day, so I look around for inspiration and useful rainy day work. Repairing things and making useful tools are usually satisfying.And I found a couple of fun and inspiring inventions by others to share.

Disconnect drip tape at main pipe, by unscrewing the connector from the tape, not by pulling the connectors out of pipe. Don’t disconnect any short drip tape blank ends, leave them in the pipe.

One person coils the mainline pipe in big 4-5 ft diameter loops, with NO kinks. Tie in three places with rope. Make and affix a plastic label if there is not already one attached. Describe what crop it was used for, and what row spacings, number of rows. Store.

Meanwhile, other people free up the drip tape without destroying the crop too much, and write the length on the ends, using the grease pencil.

Set up the cart with the axle and spring clamps, on the uphill side of the patch (helps drain the tape as you roll it)

Then roll it on appropriately labeled shuttles, two lengths at a time, tightly and tidily, each keeping to cos own side of the shuttle (so they can be unwound separately). Tuck last end in, and ensure the end of the drip tape is labeled with the length, and both sides of the shuttle are labeled.

Take all the shuttles to the barn, and hang them in pairs over the beams using rope. Use knots that a normal human will be able to undo easily. Hang shuttles high enough so people won’t bang their heads, but low enough to be reachable by someone standing on a chair.

Return all the tools and supplies.

Unrolling drip tape from shuttles, using a garden cart as support.Photo Luke Stovall

I was reminded of our drip tape system when I came across this Rowcover roller

The row cover reel is our favorite part of our system, and it is super low-tech. It is comprised of two portable saw horses with pipe straps attached and a PVC crank we made to fit on the end of the row cover pipe. We set up the saw horses at the end of the bed about eight feet apart. We then push the PVC pipe through the pipe straps on each saw horse and hammer our crank onto the end of the pipe with a rubber mallet.

By using long pipes to roll the row cover on, they have handles to hold, and a space to label length, width, condition of the row cover.

I learned from the Small Farm Central blog that Harvie connects customers directly with local farms who deliver shares of farm fresh produce customized to meet personal preferences. Like a CSA, but with choices.

Towards the end of that post I got a chuckle when I saw this flame weeder:

I wrote about it last September, when we were preparing our hoophouse beds for winter crops.

This tool is great for aerating compacted soil without inverting it. The soil beasties thank us.

Below is a photo of a hoophouse bed after broadforking before the (immediately following) task of raking to break up the big clumps and produce a fine tilth. It’s important not to let the soil dry out into bricks before raking, or life will be hard (and those soil beasties may be dead).

Lastly I’ll mention our blueberry hoop method. Maybe your bushes, like ours, are flowering now, and maybe you are determined to have a better netting system than you had last year. I described our (then new) blueberry hoop system in 2013. The blueberry area is 16′ x 65′ approx. Height of the netting supports needs to be 7′ or more for most of the space. The 20 blueberry bushes are 66″ apart, in two rows.

We chose PVC Electrical conduit to make our hoops. Unlike PVC water pipe, plastic electrical conduit is UV-inhibited for outdoor use. Lengths have flanged (bell) ends, and can be joined without any connector pieces. It’s lightweight, and no bending tools are needed (unlike for metal conduit or fencing top-rail). It packs flat for out-of-season storage, and is relatively cheap.

We made a “Spider-House” temporary framework: An idea used for temporary “field houses”. It consists of pairs of bows fastened together at the apex, in a way that spreads out into a 4-legged structure. A row of these make up the frame. An advantage is that the spiders are stronger than simple bows, and that the whole thing can be dismantled relatively easily. The shape helps add strength to lightweight bows.

We are on our way with our late fall, winter and early spring crops in the hoophouse. On September 6 and 7 we sowed five crops in our first bed – spinach, tatsoi, Bulls Blood beet greens, radishes and scallions. On September 15 we sowed lettuces, chard, pak choy, Chinese cabbage, Tokyo Bekana and Yukina Savoy, in an outdoor bed to be transplanted into the hoophouse in a few weeks, after we’ve prepared another bed.

To prepare hoophouse beds for winter crops, we first remove the summer crops to the compost pile, then spread a generous layer of compost over the surface. We use about five wheelbarrowsful for one bed 4’ x 90’. Next we move the three lengths of drip tape off to one side or the other, and broadfork the whole area. We have an all-steel broadfork from Way Cool Tools that we really like. To use a broadfork, work backwards either going the length of the bed or the width. Stab the tines into the soil and step on the crossbar, holding the long handles. Step from foot to foot until the bar touches the soil, with the tines all the way in, then step off backwards, pulling the handles towards you. This loosens a big area of soil, which hopefully crumbles into chunks. Lift the broadfork and set it back in the soil about 6” back from the first bite. Step on the bar and repeat. We’ve found it’s important to only broadfork the amount of space you have time to rake immediately, otherwise the warm hoophouse conditions dry out the soil and make it harder to cultivate into a fine tilth, which is the next task. Sometimes we use a rake, breaking the clumps up with the back of the rake, then raking the soil to break up the smaller lumps, and reshape the bed.

Sometimes we use a wide stirrup hoe very energetically. This isn’t the job scuffle hoes were designed for (that’s very shallow hoeing, and hence why we call them scuffle hoes), but the sharp hoe blade does a good job of breaking up clumpy soil. We’ve also found it important to lay the drip tapes back in place in between each day’s work, so that the soil gets irrigated when we run the system and stays damp. We don’t want dead, baked soil.

Once the bed is prepared, we measure out the areas for different crops and mark them with flags. Next we use our row-marker rake (bed prep rake) from Johnny’s Selected Seeds.

We plant crops closer in the hoophouse than outdoors, and closer to the edges of the beds. We don’t have many weeds in the hoophouse, and the paths are marked off with twine, to keep us from stepping on the beds, compacting the soil. We find that the soil does slump and compact some of its own accord, even if we don’t step on the edges (and of course, some feet do find themselves on the bed edges sometimes), hence the once-a-year broadforking. We found out how valuable the soil loosening is, because one year before we started broadforking, we decided to loosen the edges with a digging fork to make up for several years of accidental steps. The edge rows of spinach grew much bigger than the inner rows, and we realized that the whole bed needed loosening.

After the rowmarking, we deepen the furrows if needed (often it’s not needed), using a pointed hoe, then sow the seeds. We pre-sprout our spinach for a week in a jar in the fridge. Just soak the seed overnight, drain it in the morning, fit a mesh lid on the jar, and lay it on its side in the fridge. Once a day, give the jar a quarter turn to tumble the seeds and even out the moisture. This year the seeds were a bit wet when I came to sow them, and clumped together. I poured them out on a cloth to dry a bit before I sowed. This year we are growing two varieties (Avon and Reflect) side by side, still seeking a replacement for our much loved Tyee, which was pulled from the market, because it was prone to a disease prevalent in the West.

Easter Egg radish seedlings in our hoophouse.Photo Pam Dawling

The spinach, tatsoi and radishes came up very quickly, with the beets a day or two behind. The scallions came up in a week, which is quicker than at other times of year.

One week after the sowings, I thinned the spinach and radishes to 1” apart in the row. We are growing Easter Egg, Cherry Belle and White Icicle radishes. The Cherry Belle will be ready first, Easter Egg next (they mature relatively gradually, giving us a nice harvest period). Icicle are unusual long white radishes which are slower to mature, and slow to get woody.

Buckley One-cut (Eazileaf) lettuce.Photo High Mowing Seeds

Meanwhile, outdoors on September 15 we sowed the first half of the crops that we transplant bare-rooted into the hoophouse. Our planned schedule called for 10 varieties of lettuce, but I ended up sowing 12, partly because we are trying three new Vitalis one-cut lettuce varieties from High Mowing Seeds: Ezrilla, Hampton and Buckley. These are bred to provide lots of similar-sized leaves from cutting. They can be cut and mixed for baby salad mix or cut as whole heads for easy-to-prepare salads, or harvested by the leaf (or layers of leaves) once the plant has grown to full size. This is how we use them. They were previously called Eazileaf varieties, and are now called One-cut lettuces. They are only available as pelleted seed, so I regard them as too pricey to grow for baby salad mix, and best used for multiple harvests.

You can click here to read the New Head Lettuces article Andrew Mefferd wrote about this new type of lettuce in Growing for Market magazine. We have previously grown Johnny’s Salanova and Osborne’s Multileaf varieties and I wrote about them here and here. This year we are trying the High Mowing ones. We did a small trial of them outdoors in spring, knowing that in our climate (very different from High Mowing’s in Vermont) they might well bolt. They grew into handsome plants, but clearly they are more suited to fall than spring in our quickly-heating-up climate.

Other lettuces we sow for our winter hoophouse crops include Oscarde, Panisse, Tango which have a similar shape of lots of same-sized leaves, and Green Forest (romaine), Hyper Red Rumpled Wave, Merlot, Revolution, Salad Bowl and Red Salad Bowl. I would have sown Red Tinged Winter but we seem to be out of seed.

The Market Gardener’s Toolkit is an educational documentary featuring Jean-Martin Fortier, small-scale vegetable grower and author of the bestselling book The Market Gardener. In the film, he shares his tools and techniques for successful, profitable, human-scale vegetable growing. From soil preparation to strategies on dealing with insect pests, discover how this micro-farm manages to generate $150,000 in sales annually – without the use of a tractor or any heavy machinery.

I participated in the crowd-funding effort to help get this video made, and so I am now the happy owner of a digital download. I’ve watched it once, and am now organizing a group showing for our crew and neighboring gardeners.

I loved every precious minute of this video. It made me proud to be a vegetable grower, using sustainable techniques, contributing to a healthy local food supply. It made me inspired to try harder to use more effective and efficient methods. The aerial views and plan of their plots and crop rotation are inspiring and beautiful.

It was valuable to see tools in action, such as the broadfork, the five row flamer, the Terrateck manual mulch layer and the home-made precision vacuum seeder.

It was helpful (and fun!) to see the speeded-up version of the farmers moving the large sheets of “occultation plastic” (poly silage covers) used for weed control. It was encouraging to be reminded (after too many years of battling weedy gardens) that clean productive gardens are possible and, indeed, wise. They are more productive, more satisfying, more profitable, with less wasted time. I get it that hand-pulling weeds is more like first aid for a garden gone sadly wrong. I know it’s better to hoe when weeds are tiny, to flame and to prevent weeds from coming up in the first place. We’ve been doing better this year on preparing “stale seed beds” by tilling and prepping the bed at least week before we need it, then scuffle-hoeing on the day before planting. This one change is really making a noticeable difference in our gardens.

Last winter I had been thinking we needed to get a cultivating tractor, and to re-arrange our garden plots for tractor access and accept the turnaround space lost to crops that tractors require. And accept the increased use of fossil fuels, and time spent fixing machines. Watching The Market Gardener’s Toolkit instead reaffirmed the high value of intensive use of garden soils and smart manual work. This fits with the series of books I’ve been reading recently: Ben Hartman’s The Lean Farm, Curtis Stone’s Urban Farmer, Colin McCrate and Brad Halm’s High-Yield Vegetable Gardening, and of course Jean-Martin Fortier’s Market Gardener and Eliot Coleman’s work.

These books emphasize the importance of thinking clearly about what crops you grow and why. In the case of purely commercial growers, it is plain to see that some crops are much more financially worthwhile than others. Some find more ready sales than others. Some grow much quicker than others, enabling the space to be used for another crop in the same season, meaning more income (or simply more food, if you aren’t selling your crops). Our situation at Twin Oaks Community is a bit different. We are growing food to feed the community of a hundred people, year round, as best we can manage it. Commercial growers can specialize in baby salad mix and sell it at a good price at market or to restaurants. They can put a large amount of land and time into such crops. They can ignore winter root crops, or space-hogging sweet corn or time-hogging green beans. We, instead, need to figure out how to efficiently grow as many different vegetable crops as possible. That is why my book, Sustainable Market Farming focuses on production techniques and organization and planning. Although we are not tied to growing according to the relative financial profitability of different crops, we do need to plan our use of space and time, and not get distracted growing demanding crops that are difficult in our climate and don’t provide a decent-sized chunk of our diet. This is why we have stopped growing bulb fennel and parsnips, for instance. And why we do grow sweet potatoes

You may remember I reviewed Jean-Martin’s Book The Market Gardener. His book has sold over 80,000 copies, and is the winner of the American Horticultural Society 2015 Book Award and the Living Now 2015 Book Award.

This week I feel we’ve turned a corner as far as being overwhelmed by the workload. We have been able to make progress on several projects, and the complete lack of rain since August 10th means that we are gaining on the weeds.

Days of yore: carts of harvested tomatoes.Photo Wren Vile

Our sorry Roma tomatoes have come to an end, but it’s not all bad. We got 270 5-gallon buckets. Last year we harvested 313 buckets, picking until October 16. By this point last year we had harvested only 225 buckets. It took us till September 17 to get beyond today’s 270, and then another month to get the last 40 buckets. Most of those were picked in a single day when we expected frost. The plants survived the light frost and we picked twice more.

Here are the silver linings of an early end to the Roma tomatoes:

Lots of time we won’t have to spend harvesting them any more.

We can get a good cover crop in, because we can clear the plot earlier.

No green tomatoes to deal with. (We usually store them and sort ripening ones out weekly – there is a demand for fried green tomatoes, but only so many. . . )

I was able to do good seed selection for Septoria tolerance or resistance. Some plants were much better at surviving than others.

Crimson Sweet watermelon.Photo Nina Gentle

We’re also winding down on watermelon harvests. We’ve picked 522, within our goal-range of 500-600. We’ve eaten a lot, given some away, dropped a few by accident and saved plenty of seed for the next couple of years.

Our groundhog tally went up by 4 this week, one of them caught by a dog, the rest by us. We had a raccoon in the corn, but after a groundhog occupied its trap and ate its can of cat food, it hasn’t been back. We’ve had very good sweet corn yields. Bodacious, Kandy Korn and Silver Queen are our big three favorite varieties. We’re trying a few others on a small scale: Early Sunglow, Incredible, Sparkler, and Tuxana. No collated comments on those yet. We gave up on Sugar Pearl (early, white) after trying it last year. We much prefer Bodacious (early, yellow).

Ripening Concord grapes. Photo Kati Falger

Our grape harvest (mostly Concord) is almost over. Usually we harvest once a week for four weeks in August, sometimes running into September if a late spring frost froze off the flower buds and they had to develop new ones.

We watched in dismay as our June sowing of carrots suffered from Alternaria blight, which blackens the leaves. Now or never, harvest or till under? Today some of the crew, more optimistic than me, dug a third of them, and found plenty of good carrots. Some not so good, it’s true. But worth digging. No, the flavor in the hot weather is never as good as in cooler weather, but these won’t wait for cooler nights. We’re cutting our losses.

Flame weeding carrots.Photo Brittany Lewis

Another of our pressing projects is hoeing the big planting of fall carrots, which we sowed in early-mid August and flamed before the seedlings emerged. The flaming was well-timed, thanks to the “Indicator Beets” – a few beet seeds sown at he end of the bed. Beets germinate a bit quicker than carrots, so as soon as the beets emerge, it’s time to flame the carrots. This year, the bit that hasn’t worked so well (apart from the drought), has been the emergence of self-sowed buckwheat, resulting from the summer cover crop we planted there, and didn’t till in in time before it set seed. So the hoeing has become urgent (buckwheat grows so quickly!). We have made a good start.

We’ve finalized our plans the outdoor winter cover crops and next year’s main crops and also the hoophouse winter crops. We have spinach seeds sprouting in a jar in the fridge while we prepare the bed. This morning in the hoophouse I pulled buckwheat and shoveled 7 wheelbarrows of compost. I was motivated by the hope that if I got the compost spreading done, others would do the broadforking and raking before my next day in there on Friday!! The broadfork is a great tool, but energetic. I’d rather barrow compost!

SSAWG Conference

I just got confirmation that I will be a presenter at the Southern SSAWG Conference January 29 and 30. I’m presenting Intensive Vegetable Production on a Small Scale.

Now, time to switch over the drip irrigation and water the blueberries.